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From: Soeren Ziehe (robinton_at_gmx.de)
Date: Fri Sep 06 2002 - 03:44:00 CDT

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    In article <1031192635.27151.37.camelbloodnock> [05 Sep 02]
       Russell Fulton <r.fultonauckland.ac.nz> wrote:

    > Am I right in assuming that this just more spammers looking for
    > places to launder mail or is it more sinister than that? I.e. do
    > we believe the 'arbitrary command execution attempt' bit?

    Spammers looking for vulnerable formmail versions.

    For the last months they've been looking for
    /cgi-bin/formmail.pl
    /cgi-bin/formmail.cgi
    /cgi-local/formmail.pl
    /cgi-local/formmail.cgi

    Since last week I also see probes for
    /cgi-bin/FormMail.pl
    /cgi-bin/FormMail.cgi

    We had 2 incidents in our network were "older" (1.6 - latest is 1.92)
    installations were detected in "non-standard" locations.
    For one incident I've got log data. The attack consisted of coordinated
    accesses from several locations worlwide. (br, us, de, edu, jp, ...).
    After disabling the script (ca. 3h into the attack) these distributed
    attacks continued for about 18 hours.

    Address restrictions were circumvented by using
    "<recipientexample.com>www.victim.com" style recipient addresses.

    No hard evidence, but I suspect the following:
    - the spammers may be looking actively for forms and associated scripts
    by spidering websites
    - the spammers may command "bot nets" or distributed cracked and
    compromised hosts, which then are used to send out spam.

    Robinton

    -- 
    Origin: Die Antwort lautet 41.735979 ! ;-)
    

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